Natalia Patratskaya - Sapphire fairy. Prose in English

The school held the firework – An hour of fun competitions, such as KVN.

Ira once suggested:

– Katerina, let’s go to the dance club at DK. I will say that you already danced.

I came. Danced. Has reached performances at concerts, has acted in two and all. The school had a set in the volleyball section. She played Katerina, trained, reached the competition between schools. Got the nickname “evil captain.”

Went to a summer camp. She played table tennis. The best tennis player of the camp was not indifferent to her. Pretty quickly, she mastered the wisdom of the game. Together they all won and played the most. This is not all. With girls Katerina played musketeers. At the end she tied her long hair with a ribbon and tucked it up, this was how the musketeer’s hair did and no less.

She was sent to the Olympiad, but she solved them well, that is, the first places she did not smile. In the courtyard of his house on the street, the children played “The Gardener”, tennis, volleyball, and theater. In the new school they wrote with pens with steel feathers and dipped them into inkpots.

Katerina was tall, slim and played volleyball, danced in the friendly team of the house of culture, but the dances did not detain her for a long time. She had long, luxurious hair that she braided and twisted so that it seemed shorter.

Katerina’s father bought clothes and shoes several times. He chose beautiful things and shoes. She was involved in sports, so the food could not for the time being spoil her figure. She was bought skates-knives in honor of the countrywoman, Olympic champion. Winter evenings Katerina spent on the rink. My father had a garden in which, apart from apple trees, pears, plums, currants, and stretchers, tiger lilies always grew.

We went to the garden by train to the cottage. The memory of unusual taste and slate apple trees remained in my memory. Cottage sold and went to the sea. Cherries, stones on the beach, portraits of pioneers-heroes. Concerts of Lilliputians. Divine evening view of the sea. Pancakes on the beach. Bagels. Closed museum of paintings by Aivazovsky. It was wonderful!

Katerina has no offense for the wonderful time of her childhood, for the wonderful time of her youth. Everything was as it was, and her parents did everything so that she had what she had.

Katerina felt that her magical energy dried up, ordinary life began. So she remembered the summer, spent not in the village, but on the lakeside.

Residents of the village, located in the spurs of the mountains, believed that the village of Medny bucket has its own spirit, which protects it from ancient times. According to local legends and eyewitnesses, on one side of the village there is an exit to the space portal. The appearance of the village has changed over seven centuries. In recent years, the village seemed younger, new houses appeared, and old ones began to be tiled.

Katerina arrived in the village Copper bucket for the holidays to Aunt Dasha, who lived in an ordinary wooden house. And the house of the prince… The house with the towers stood on the edge of the village, on the bank of a small river. The copper roof gleamed in the sun. The vertical protrusions on the house smoothly passed into the turrets. The first floor of the perimeter was lined with greenish marble. All the tracks on the site were lined with greenish ceramics, a slender young man ran along them. Soon he got tired of this occupation, and he shouted towards the windows:

– Father, everything! I’m leaving, I’m sick of such holidays!

“Go, Feofan, wherever you want,” the gray-haired, important, purebred man said quietly. He appeared out of the ground behind Theophanes.

– Again you scare me, Afanasy Afanasyevich! I am brave, but your appearances from nowhere infuriate me!

– And you do not be angry. Live in peace, although it is not given to you. You need to live not one life, but several: you will recognize the past as an archeologist, learn the present as a coach, and move from the present to the future as a designer.

– You’re visionary, father! I will be who I will be according to the situation. By the way, Katerina’s niece came to Aunt Dasha. Girl what you need. Am I by any chance a relative of hers?

– I know that she came. Our kinship with her is of ancient roots, you will not marry her, but if you meet her, help. Now you can leave, and I will call Catherine to me.

Katerina walked slowly along the village street. She came to Aunt Dasha for the summer holidays. An elderly handsome man was walking towards the girl. He stopped, staring at her, and asked her to go near him. He was handsome in the twilight of his days and divinely good.

Further more: he invited the girl to his home. Katerina was not scared, she knew that the man’s name was Afanasy Afanasyevich. She saw him last year, he lived in a posh house by local standards. His prim mansion was served by a butler, a cook and a chauffeur. One woman cleaned and put the house in order in the mornings, when the owner was still asleep.

Katerina examined the pompous house, and she felt uneasy. Something terrible through the stucco and huge paintings. She shivered involuntarily. She wanted to leave another’s secret without recognizing her. But the owner offered the girl a deal or contract. He offered her to live in his house without special duties, but with one condition: she should not leave his house during the summer holidays – it was supposedly that much time the doctors left for him to live.

She will receive so much money for her service that she can buy a new home of the same size as his old palace. As for his house, he is not subject to sale. The girl, knowing that the money goes to hard work, agreed to the conditions of Afanasy Afanasyevich. The owner promised that he would warn aunt Dasha of her whereabouts.

The butler lived on the ground floor and practically never left the mansion. The cook and the driver went to sleep at home. The chauffeur was engaged in shopping for the house, sometimes he would take a cook with him if he went to buy groceries. Katerina quickly realized that she could leave the house with the driver. And traveling around the house was her day enjoyable.

Another condition of the contract had a negative effect: she could not have cash, but she could choose the necessary things and products, and the driver paid for her requests from the owner’s wallet.

Two weeks flew like a vacation.

Then it became more difficult, and Catherine wanted to leave the house of Afanasy Afanasyevich, but she could not do that. She was ready to break the contract, but she had no way back for the next two months. The owner did not require her presence next to her in the room, she could move around the palace and the small lawn around the house at any time.

The woman who came in the morning to clean the mansion did not speak with Catherine. She collected clothes in the laundry and brought back clean and ironed. Men serving the owner, were obscenely laconic.

The owner of Catherine did not say much. More than two phrases a day it was impossible to wait. The girl was ready to talk to herself. She always communicated easily with people and often got tired of their confessions, and now she was in a verbal vacuum. In the house she counted five televisions of different times and not a single computer. There were no phones that surprised her unpleasantly. But there was a worldwide library.

Books were in the cabinets, closed by glass doors. Surprisingly, the books were without signs of aging paper. Katerina was struck by this fact so much that she was involved in reading. All the books were as if they had just been brought from the store. But looking at the year of publication, she was even more surprised.

The library contained books older than a hundred years or more! Soon Katerina noticed that the bookcases are tight enough that the doors close tightly and effortlessly on her part. A few days later she felt a strange smell in the book storage, he drove her away from the books. Books seemed to ask her not to touch them!